Hens on traditional free range poultry organic farm grazing on the grass

Organic is a system of farming and food production. Organic farmers aim to produce high-quality food, using methods that benefit our whole food system, from people to planet, plant health to animal welfare.

Organic farmers work to a strict set of standards, which must legally comply with strict EU regulation, to ensure that their farms sustain the health of:

  • Soils
  • Ecosystems
  • Animals
  • People

These standards are built on the key principles of organic agriculture:

  • Health
  • Ecology
  • Care
  • Fairness

Certification is legally required to grow, process or market organic products, and all organic farms and companies are inspected by a certification body, at least once a year. 

Share here useful resources for organic farming

 

Soil Association

Organic Research Centre

National Organic Combinable Crops (NOCC22) event - 5 July 2022 at the Cholderton Estate in Wiltshire.

OF&G Organic

Organic Arable

OF&G Organic and ADAS Organic Bulletin

Related Organisations

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Are there circumstances when AD digestate can be classified as "organic"? 

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Integrated Pest Management highlights the growth of a healthy crop with the least possible disruption to agro-ecosystems and encourages natural pest control mechanisms. IPM is one of the tools for low-pesticide-input pest management, and IPM must now be implemented by all professional agchem users.

Regenerative farming looks to optimise the use of the ecological system and environment, in order to benefit from the natural ecosystem services that they provide.

The Farming and Land Use Team at the Soil Association have a specialist knowledge of all UK agricultural sectors as well as in depth understanding of organic and agroecological food production systems. Our goal is to support organic and non-organic farmers alike to transition towards more sustainable practices.

Practical sustainable farming regardless of labels.

The intricate web of relationships between physical, chemical and biological soil components underpins crop and livestock health and productivity.

This topic refers to the whole food supply chain, from farm fork, and all the products and services that contribute to food production.

The Organic Research Centre (ORC) is the UK's leading independent organic research organisation. Changing the future of food and farming.

Join renowned UK farmers, tech developers, and agri-tech sector representatives for a day of on-farm discussions, networking, and demonstrations at the innovative Shimpling Park Farm in Suffolk for Agri-EPI's Annual Conference 2022 on 27th October.

An event to discuss how will we secure the plant varieties needed for more sustainable UK agriculture How will we secure the plant varieties needed for a more sustainable and resilient UK agriculture? Can the plant breeding community rise to the challenge, and what is needed to achieve this?

Guide from FIBL and Organic Research Centre giving the fundamentals of soil fertility.

Five organic farmers in North East Scotland have launched a pilot project with a comm

Exchange knowledge, enhance organic farming.  Organic Farm Knowledge is a web platform dedicated to sharing practices on organic farming.

Crop modelling is a useful tool in agriculture to improve our understanding how a crop grows in interaction with all external factors, including environmental interactions and the crop management practices in place. The idea is that by modelling cropping system factors as a mathematical representation, and incorporating real past data to 'calibrate' the model,  you can then simulate various scenarios and predict the impacts of certain changes on crop growth. One example of this would be a simulation of predicted environmental conditions under various climate scenarios to predict the impacts of climate change on crop growth and yields. Whilst models are oversimplifications of reality and can never capture all the complexity of agricultural systems, modelling has been a vital tool underpinning key agricultural developments and models are constantly being developed to be more dynamic, complex and sensitive. One particular application of modelling is in weed control. This page highlights the application of modelling in weed management and introduces a case study of a weed model from a DEFRA report.       

The phrase “Non-Inversion Tillage” (NI) as used in this review first requires definition. Any system which does not seek to substantially invert the soil profile is regarded as NI.

Big changes are coming to the UK Organic industry, and you are invited to join!

Shaping our relationship to the soil.

Dr Emma Davies: IBERS, Aberystwyth University.

Stephen is a first generation farmer who has been farming organically for over two decades. This resource is from Agricology.

Creeping thistle has become an increasing problem especially for organic arable farms with soils of higher organic matter content.

This guide provides a good basis for achieving high-quality products.

This manual provides an in-depth review of the applications of crop rotation-including improving soil quality and health, and managing pests, diseases, and weeds.

A mixed farming system, based around livestock and cropping, is a fundamental part of organic, agroecological and regenerative farming.

Value chains with close collaboration between actors, both from the supply chain and wider society, enable direct, dynamic and innovative, relationships that better facilitate management and sales of smaller volumes of diverse products.

Organic Management Techniques to Improve Sustainability of Non-Organic Farming.

Natural & Organic Products Expo is the source for the latest eco-friendly and sustainable products you cannot find anywhere else

The traditional cultivation of maize is accompanied by numerous mechanical cultivations and the application of herbicides.

This OGA webinar will give an overview of mechanised tillage, from bed preparation to weed control, looking at cultivation tools and their use in various contexts.

A webinar for Organic, low input and in-conversion farms to highlight changes in farming support payments.

Learn about organic fruit production with this podcast

Nathan Richards of Troed Y Rhiw farm, Ceredigion, will talk to us about a particular aspect of agroforestry under cover, using stone fruit.

This document from SRUC summarises scientific and practical information on characteristics to consider when selecting varieties for organic farming. The information is based on variety trials.

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Configure the meta tags below.

Use tokens to avoid redundant meta data and search engine penalization. For example, a 'keyword' value of "example" will be shown on all content using this configuration, whereas using the [node:field_keywords] automatically inserts the "keywords" values from the current entity (node, term, etc).

Browse available tokens.

Simple meta tags.

The text to display in the title bar of a visitor's web browser when they view this page. This meta tag may also be used as the title of the page when a visitor bookmarks or favorites this page, or as the page title in a search engine result. It is common to append '[site:name]' to the end of this, so the site's name is automatically added. It is recommended that the title is no greater than 55 - 65 characters long, including spaces.
A brief and concise summary of the page's content, preferably 150 characters or less. Where as the description meta tag may be used by search engines to display a snippet about the page in search results, the abstract tag may be used to archive a summary about the page. This meta tag is no longer supported by major search engines.

Meta tags that might not be needed by many sites.

Geo-spatial information in 'latitude; longitude' format, e.g. '50.167958; -97.133185'; see Wikipedia for details.
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Robots
A comma-separated list of keywords about the page. This meta tag is used as an indicator in Google News.
Highlight standout journalism on the web, especially for breaking news; used as an indicator in Google News. Warning: Don't abuse it, to be used a maximum of 7 times per calendar week!
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Used to rate content for audience appropriateness. This tag has little known influence on search engine rankings, but can be used by browsers, browser extensions, and apps. The most common options are general, mature, restricted, 14 years, safe for kids. If you follow the RTA Documentation you should enter RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
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Tell search engines when to index the page again. Very few search engines support this tag, it is more useful to use an XML Sitemap file.
Control when the browser's internal cache of the current page should expire. The date must to be an RFC-1123-compliant date string that is represented in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), e.g. 'Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:12:56 GMT'. Set to '0' to stop the page being cached entirely.

The Open Graph meta tags are used to control how Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and other social networking sites interpret the site's content.

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A alternative version of og:image and has exactly the same requirements; only one needs to be used. Multiple values may be used, separated by a comma. Note: Tokens that return multiple values will be handled automatically. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
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The type of image referenced above. Should be either 'image/gif' for a GIF image, 'image/jpeg' for a JPG/JPEG image, or 'image/png' for a PNG image. Note: there should be one value for each image, and having more than there are images may cause problems.
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A set of meta tags specially for controlling the summaries displayed when content is shared on Twitter.

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A description that concisely summarizes the content of the page, as appropriate for presentation within a Tweet. Do not re-use the title text as the description, or use this field to describe the general services provided by the website. The string will be truncated, by Twitter, at the word to 200 characters.
By default Twitter tracks visitors when a tweet is embedded on a page using the official APIs. Setting this to 'on' will stop Twitter from tracking visitors.
The URL to a unique image representing the content of the page. Do not use a generic image such as your website logo, author photo, or other image that spans multiple pages. Images larger than 120x120px will be resized and cropped square based on longest dimension. Images smaller than 60x60px will not be shown. If the 'type' is set to Photo then the image must be at least 280x150px. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field if the field is configured properly.
The MIME type for the media contained in the stream URL, as defined by RFC 4337.